Organ and anatomical structure segmentation is of importance in several medical applications, including the creation of surfaces used in image-guided surgical systems. A variety of prior art organ segmentation methods and systems are disclosed in Dawant, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,519,209, which is incorporated herein in its entirety by specific reference for all purposes.
One of the most difficult issues for segmentation on medical images is to define the adjunctions between two organs or anatomical structures that have the same or similar image intensities. The prior art often fails to distinguish targets from backgrounds in this situation.
Accordingly, what is needed is way to distinguish target and background areas with the same or similar image intensities for medical image segmentation purposes.